The history of the Spanish musical press in the eighteenth century has usually been interpreted as an ongoing struggle against a narrow and underdeveloped market. Print itself has been seen as a superior technology that helps to secure stability and clarity of the musical text. In this light, José de Torres, prestigious organist and composer, music director of the Spanish Chapel Royal from 1720 and owner of an important musical press, has appeared to be a heroic modernizing figure. This article challenges this received image, underlining the effectiveness of censorship and the control of individual initiatives in the field of music publishing in early eighteenth-century Spain. This is demonstrated by newly discovered documents concerning a lawsuit brought against Torres, who owned a royal printing privilege from 1700 until his death in 1738, by Francisco Díaz de Guitián, who wanted to establish a music press of his own. Several musicians acted as witnesses, giving a detailed view of how the music press worked at the time, notably how the approbations customarily given by established musicians on behalf of music treatises intended for publication were used to promote or block a career. Based on these new insights, a general study of all the known prints by the Imprenta de Música is presented in a broader editorial, political and cultural context.

The moral and political propriety of musical pleasure constituted one of Charles Burney's continuous lines of thought from the 1770s to the 1790s. As a public figure, the music historian found himself called upon to state why music matters – in a preface, a dedication or an essay. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burney read in musical performances symptoms of contemporary society and politics, but, unlike Rousseau, he perceived in modern music signs of civilization's progress. Musical excellence, according to Burney, required both freedom and affluence; thus while Burney rejected absolutist monarchy, he nevertheless praised the achievements of court culture. Indeed, his advocacy of music as an ‘innocent luxury’ reads as an addendum to eighteenth-century disputes on the morality and benefits of luxury. The social implications of this definition of music, however, are problematic: while Burney acknowledged the right of each individual to feel as they please, he also claimed for the music critic the exclusive authority to speak publicly about music. This essay explores these aspects of Burney's political philosophy of music in relation to the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Avison, Wollstonecraft and Hume.

This article uses Mozart's unfinished singspiel Zaide (k336b, 1780) and its source singspiel Das Serail to reconsider the eighteenth-century Kindertruppen: wandering troupes of young singers, actors and dancers who performed in the court and commercial theatres of Europe. These troupes' repertoire often self-consciously addressed the blend of charm and impropriety that lay behind their controversial appeal. I consider the subgenre of seraglio opera – popular with both youth and adult troupes – and in particular the motifs of the audition scene and the captive's lament as metatheatrical commentaries on the cultural politics of operatic spectatorship. When young actors inhabited the fictional seraglio, their display offered compelling corroboration of contemporary discourse about propriety, naturalness and absorption in the theatre, as well as the new sense of urgency regarding the sheltering of youthful virtue.

This article discusses and places in historical context a newly discovered set of letters between Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni and his agent in Naples during the visit of King Philip V of Spain to the city in 1702. These letters, in part transcribed in an Appendix, clarify several details concerning Corelli's visit to the city and confirm that he was accompanied by the violinist Matteo Fornari as well as by a third musician, the cellist Pippo Amadei, instead of G. L. Lulier, as hitherto supposed. With new facts that augment information already known from other sources, such as the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Maria de' Medici, the article sheds new light on disputes that occurred at this time between other musicians and their patrons, such as those involving G. B. Stuck and the Giudice family. Considering these facts in the wider context of the War of the Spanish Succession, I argue that Corelli's visit was the subject of significant political calculations on the part of Cardinal Ottoboni and members of the Spanish and Neapolitan nobility.